Member Articles

Enjoy our extensive collection of member-contributed articles to learn how other Scrum practitioners use Scrum in the workplace.

Read about the experiences and ideas of Agile colleagues around the world, and share your own thoughts here. You can also visit Spotlight, which features blogs by experts in the fields of Scrum, Agile, and the broader business world.

Opinions represent those of the authors and not of Scrum Alliance. The sharing of member-contributed content on this site does not imply endorsement of specific Scrum methods or practices beyond those taught by Scrum Alliance Certified Trainers and Coaches.

Is your team facing difficulty in forecasting when projects will be completed? Are there large numbers of unestimated user stories in the product backlog? Does the planning meeting last several hours and is it full of confrontation?

One of the fundamental Agile values is, "We value responding to change over following a plan," which has sometimes been misinterpreted to mean that we don’t need to plan an Agile project. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Without a shift-left test approach -- early and often -- developers and testers find it difficult or impossible to find defects until system parts are integrated in a system test. Why can't we reap the benefits of Agile?

Spring has sprung. Flowers are in bloom. Clocks have been adjusted to reflect Daylight Savings Time. All of these little indicators point to the undeniable fact that May the Fourth is just around the corner. . . .

Even a standard user story is sometimes difficult to obtain from the stakeholder, because they have a vague idea about what they want. In such cases, the "Five W's" can be useful for writing user stories with complete and coherent information.

Have you ever assessed the way your team follows Agile/Scrum? We have. Beforehand I thought we were working to a higher standard of Agile/Scrum. But I felt the opposite after seeing the assessment results. . . .